Five Triumphal Gestures
(For Alan and Geraldine)
1.
Last drops spread the leaves
dangers of exploitation
that blends and (as it were) fuses
mumming plays in royal England
geometry and music are not essential
(do not give as you are asked, nor
answer as you are questioned)
take them all
original patent
maddens the hero
Stand up you moron
onward loser!
gravity & music are not
essential either.
Last drops spread the leaves (see
above)
Light is an experience
in rural England
When chickens are cold
they save half
my effort [or she]
knows how [she is]–She is
Self-knowledge for whatever spectator
(suspected
goddess)
Mutual Cooperation Unit
only a fragment of whose earlier collections survive her.
Boredom is what I least deserve
or desire (he will be careful
not to say the word “decapitation” again!) re–
volt of the provinces of a lighter-than-air body,
which body
eats itself, or
grasps a microphone
for eternity.
2.
Who do you think you are?
rat & finch,
people just
watched. per-
cussor, as in
river-smooth &
waiting
(Pound-Note)
in the bag. eh what?
wife takes
the picture (almost
medical textbook, droll)
audience asks
wait a minute?
handshake?, if that’s
looking enough for you
then ding-a-ling.
(breathy
pause--
shaped
thinking)
come on.
3.
high hill
of my
old age/
endlessly
distracted
molecules
“drilling
down”
to the
individual
gradation
of grays
“but that’s
orchestration”
trundle along
the Boggard
path
yet I need
an aesthetic
immune
to art films
& engine houses
fragments
of a realm
beyond my
reach
mercurial &
sustained
provocations:
a Sassanian bowl, perhaps
a gryphon’s claw, perhaps
a Roman stone
bathtub
4.
Clarification of thought
by walking
The amputee doing
calisthenics in his door way
--“Do you have your ticket?”
--“I have the wing of a crow.”
5.
Beneath the wild
ferns by the bubble-
scummed creek,
John Keats opens
his webs of empty
flesh so the tap-
roots of the willows
find him, and
stones and clumps
of sticky dirt tumble
through him and
where light once
collided within the
tender lobes of
neural tissue, all
grows cold and clean
and clear.
We’d failed to video-
tape our luminous
dog, and even the
snapshots we’d taken
were focused
on a human-
centered world,
allowing John Keats
his skewed spot
off to the extreme
right or left of center.
Now even the photographs
in their fine leather albums
have begun to fade.
—Jesse Glass